(First posted on Medium, Jun 25, 2018)
When I was in high school, my best friend’s brother was about to embark on a trip to England. On a Saturday morning, I went to my friend’s house as I usually did and found Muslim clerics preparing to perform a Quran reading before the journey. Excuse my ignorance but, at that time, I found it really weird. I asked myself, why would you try to get people to read out the Quran for an entire day? Looking back, it feels like my confusion was born out of the strong assumption that oral tales are a thing of the past, a thing that our ancestors did and now that we have writing systems and books, we no longer have to rely on oral storytelling. But is that true?
In his book How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton the British Social Anthropologist explained the challenge oral storytelling once had: memory. Centuries ago, there were no memory cards or disks, no phones with 30 gigabyte memories, and no cloud storage systems. Oral stories as such were stored in the brains of a few people.
In the West African Yoruba culture, there are people called “alaro-oba.”Everyday, they wake Yoruba kings up by telling them stories, tracing the king’s ancestral lineage and the history of the kingdom. The kings themselves, are expected to be custodians of history, as it is assumed their initiation rites involve acquisition of oral history. But often, the multiple kings within the larger Yoruba kingdom disagree on what really happened in the past. They tend to remember history differently. Thus, as Connerton explains, inscribed methods such as hieroglyphics and printing have helped us overcome the dual obstacles of memory and uniformity. When written, a story recollecting the past becomes inscribed and preserved in time. This is why years after Karl Marx’s death, we still know the ideas he tried to share. Overtime, reading and writing have become our prominent tools for discovering and sharing knowledge.
But there are thousands of people who do not read. According to the Pew Research Center, about 24% of American adults have not read a book in the last year. That runs into millions of people. Failing to read is not always a matter of choice. Some people never learnt how to, some don’t have enough time to and others were never forced to develop the reading habit.
After falling in love podcasts, I realised, we have sort of come full circle. Today, you can both read and listen to books and stories. You can learn without reading, and more so choose what, when and how. Stored on device memories, there is an almost perfect duplication for every listener. Thus, overcoming the age old challenge with regards to memory.
Like the radio, podcasts could help information spread faster as people gain access to the internet. Over the last year, I have listened to at least 100 podcast episodes. Probably, 4,000 minutes. Unlike reading a book, it’s easy to listen. Our ears, once trained to listen to people don’t have to be trained again. With very little effort and you can learn a ton of stuff. I am practically addicted to podcasts so I wonder, what do you listen to?